Podcasts & Blog

“A Few Words about Feelings,” by Andrew Schatkin

All of us are concerned about feelings, mainly our own. Sad to say, we give little thought to other people and their feelings and, as I said, we are rather egregiously and absolutely concerned with our own typical human self-involvement and egotism. This little essay will concern itself with analyzing feelings.

The first thing that must be said is that feelings are very inexact indicators of truth. Our feelings may be affected when someone chooses not to talk to us, or declines, or is indifferent to that issue. In reality, that person may be simply living their life without reference to our feelings at all, or to ourselves at all. We interpret their indifference or lack of attention to us as a stab at our feelings and personhood, At times, our feelings are affected when someone speaks to us in what we perceive as an overly harsh, cutting, and mean spirited fashion. That may be the way that person speaks to everyone and that particular behavior may be and is not directed to us or our feelings.

Thus as we see by these examples our feelings interpret things and twist them, misleading us, and so it may be said that feelings are not very exact indicators of truth. Second, in the present state of society, feelings do not occupy a very great role. An example would be the ideal of romantic love, which governed western culture for some 1900 years up to the present time when lust has taken over. lf we chance to view the movies or listen to the Broadway shows of the 1930s and 1940s, we see romantic love featured men and women approach each other gingerly and barely touch.
At that time in society, love was paramount, not lust. The films of that era depicted men and women as falling in love and getting married. The films of today portray them as jumping into bed, to wit the James Bond films. The popular music of our day is crude and its lyrics at times offensive, featuring animal passion as opposed to the love songs of South Pacific, one of the great Broadway shows of the 1940s, including “Some Enchanted Evening”. If we have not grown up from love, we perhaps have grown away from it and so feelings are nulled and hidden and not really featured.

The delicacy of romantic love and the love songs of the Broadway stage have been overcome by crude, loud, blaring cacophony, featuring grotesquely offensive lyrics.
One may speculate that the reason for this is the decline of the Christian worldview which promoted love leading to marriage. That worldview has been slowly eroded and in some cases eliminated depending on who you are talking to.

A final point in this little literary byway about feelings is that feelings and emotions differ between child and adult. The child is concerned, if not twisted and obsessed with, his own feelings and being loved or better put being the recipient of love from his parents, teachers and other adults that he or she looks up to. Adult feelings are different. Compassion, kindness, and charity are adult emotions and feelings. They concern themselves not with the feelings of our persons in our self but concern consideration and humanity as respects others. Only a mature adult can realize and express these feelings. What then can we say of feelings? What with cell phones, emails, computers DVDs, television, and movies feelings and relationships are distant and removed and so love is distant and removed. This is another reason why feelings are on the decline in our present society. We are more and more separated by technology and electronics and the opportunity to form giving, concerned, compassionate humanitarian relationships is becoming and has become more and more difficult if not unreachable.

One may hope that human relationships will make a comeback from the forces of darkness that assault us men and women A world without feelings between persons is a gray, boring world and is unforgiving and without growth and dynamism. One may hope that there will be a return to the romantic humanitarian ideal, which is the only way to true growth.